Category: El Sexto – Danilo Maldonado Machado

El Sexto detailed to 14ymedi that earlier this week he received at the home of his mother, Maria Victoria Machado, a summons for 22 November for an “interview.” The uniformed officer who delivered the citation told the family that it was related to “a complaint for harassment” made by his ex-wife.

However, when he presented himself on Tuesday morning in response to the citation, police officials were not able to give him any more details about the presumed accusation. Maldonado tried to travel that same day, but at the airport an immigration official confirmed that he was “regulated” by the National Revolutionary Police (PNR).

On Thursday the artist went to the Vedado police station to demand an explanation of his case. There they told him he could not travel, but a few minutes later he received contrary information.

El Sexto was arrested in Havana on Christmas Eve of 2014, when he proposed to stage a performance with two pigs he had painted with the names of Fidel of Raul. On that occasion he spent ten months in Valle Grande prison without trial.

Among the major violations listed by the report is the lack of freedom of expression exemplified in the imprisonment for ten months without trial of the artist Danilo Maldonado, known as El Sexto, when he attempted to stage a performance art piece with two pigs on which he had painted the names of Fidel and Raul.

The human rights organization denounced the state monopoly on the media and the harassment of independent journalists and bloggers. The note recalls the police cordon around the 14ymedio newsroom, to prevent its reporters from covering the activities of the International Human Rights Day, on 10 December.

Censorship on the web and low connectivity are also addressed in the document. “Internet access is still prohibitively expensive for most, and far from accessible to all,” it says. Despite the appearance of dozens of wifi zones and navigation rooms, “only 25 per cent of Cubans use the internet, while only five per cent of homes are connected,” denounces the text. 

“The landline, mobile and internet connections of government critics, human rights activists and journalists are often monitored or disabled,” says AI, for whom these actions are “a clear breach of the right to freedom of expression, including the right to seek, receive and impart information.”

The difficulties faced by international agencies to access independent information is also reflected in the document. “Communicating with Cuban human rights activists remains challenging, particularly at times when the authorities are arresting people based on their political opinion.”

According to the organization, Cuban citizens are “finding ways” to circumvent censorship and share information “From underground Wi-Fi, to creating apps, to harnessing the power of USBs.”

Amnesty International is a global movement, with a presence in more than 150 countries that aims to “undertake research and take action to prevent and end grave abuses of civil, political, social, cultural and economic rights throughout the world.” Cuba is the only country in the continent that does not allow access to Amnesty International, which has been unable to send an official mission to the island since 1990.

In Miami’s Market Gallery, El Sexto, (a nickname that refers “The Cuban Five,” the group of Cuban agents who served sentences in the United States for espionage and who are considered heroes by Raul Castro’s government), will present his artworks created in the Netherlands, Cuba and the United States, including 40 drawings done in prison.

The title of the exposition is Pork, an animal revered for its meat by Cubans and one that unwittingly led this graffiti artist to prison. “Blame George Orwell,” he jokes.

Maldonado, 32, tried to do a piece of performance art in Cuba based on Animal Farm, Orwell’s satire about Stalinism in which the animals rise up against the farmer under the leadership of the pigs, who end up perverting the new rules and imposing their own power.

At Christmas of 2014 he was arrested in Havana before he was able to release two pigs, painted green and with the names Raul and Fidel written on their hides; he remained in prison without charges for ten months.

While behind bars he drew and wrote a kind of diary, when he was not in isolation, undertook a hunger strike, and was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. He also won the 2015 Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissidence, awarded by the Human Rights Foundation.

As appetizer to his exhibition in Miami on Thursday, 25 February, he will stage a live evening performance, accompanied by his friend Gorki Aguila and his band Porno para Ricardo, and a curious film by Andy Warhol entitled “The Life of Juanita Castro.”

There may also be some pig there, says this mysterious artist, who believes that “art can do everything.”

For this reason he does not forgive many Cuban artists who, in his view, have been, and are, accomplices of the Castro regime. “That is the art of lies,” he says, about those who “are not capable of questioning the system.”

“Much of the blame for this system that has lasted so long is on the artists,” he says, convinced that they have helped to legitimize Fidel Castro, leader of the Revolution, and his brother Raul, today president of Cuba, and they have also helped to deform the minds of Cubans.

But the blame is not entirely on the “hostages,” he says, referring to Cubans. There are also other governments in the Americas and Europe who have contributed to perpetuating totalitarianism in Cuba, he asserts.

When El Sexto was able to leave Cuba, thanks to a grant from Justice and Peace Netherlands, and came to know the world “outside,” he felt he had been “robbed” his whole life and that “an experiment” had been carried out on him and on Cubans in general.

However, he does not plan to leave Cuba and entirely forget about it, like others. “Of course (I will return), I was born there for a reason,” he says.

He has a daughter in Cuba, Renata Maria who is two-and-a-half, and he told EFE that everything he does “is to let her name rise higher.”

An anonymous hand placed next to the gallery entrance where El Sexto will have his debut as an exhibitor, two stickers made my him: one is a portrait of Renata with a chick on her head and the word “despiertica” (little awake one), and the other a self-portrait with a rooster on his own head and the word “awake.”

Cubans “waking up within” is, for El Sexto, the only way to change Cuba, apart from, clearly, “the [Castro] government stepping down,” a government that “has spent 50 years taking things from the people and exercising power by force.”

Danilo Maldonado admits that when he was younger he thought “about trying to escape,” but then he came to understand his role as an artist. When he was younger than now, painting the walls of Havana made him feel good, but he looked at art as a hobby, like an affair with a woman. At age 25, after having done everything, including a job as a computer teacher, he decided to turn completely to art. “Today I am happily married,” he says.